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What's so unbelievable about meal deals? It seems like a really straightforward bundle purchase.

A sandwich, bag of crisps and a drink for £5 is an actual deal. Sandwich alone in U.S. would be $10 and the “$15 Meal Deal” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Gosh, it used to be £3 not that long ago. About £5 for a wrap at Prêt if I couldn't be bothered to go fight with the tourists to cross the road down Kingsway.

It's £3.85. Not that much more.

£5.50+ is for the better “main” options, some of which used to be in the base deal, in most places that do a meal deal.

There's a lot to complain about in the UK, but food price/quality is actually pretty good. Not the absolute best, but far from the worst and certainly not Scandinavian prices.

Costco sells really good hotdogs with a large coke for $1.50.

Mechanically reclaimed meat and a half gallon of high fructose corn water isn't much of a comparison.

I honestly can’t understand why not wasting meat is such a bad thing?

Sure from an efficiency point of view its fantastic, personally i like some texture from my meal deal.

Mmh, you can get 3 el cheapo sandwiches for 1.99€, a 100g bag of chips for 0.99€ and a liter of water for 0.90€ or flavoured /coke for 1.99€ in Germany

Considering a £ is more then a €, supposedly at last - it doesn't sound like a good deal to me


Can you give an example, as I'm not sure it's a fair comparison?

https://www.tesco.com/shop/en-GB/products/262308005


I don't think I could find a sandwich anywhere around here in Canada save maybe one of those awful gas station ones for under $6

The ones being discussed in the UK are in the triangular box like that, but there's so much competition between the shops that they're ok.

It's also a dense enough country that they will be at most a day or two old.


Incorrect. Maybe you familiar with the high cost of living areas. There are similar $5 deals in the United States. The US is a big place and has many, many businesses offering very similar deals.

Thing is, the meal deals are _everywhere_ in the UK. There is no "high cost of living" priced Tesco. Or Sainsbury's. Or 5 other supermarkets.

Meal deal prices are higher in certain places, like motorway service stations. If there's a captive market, they'll sneak the price up just like every other company. If there's competition they'll use lower pricing.

If you want a shitty sandwich you can find it for $5 in the US no problem. Plus some variation of the sausage roll that will clean you out just as well.

And by "clean you out" you mean financially or both?

Oh, you'll be able to afford it... but you may end up having to spend some time instead

$6.5 is about what you'd spend to get a bag of chips, hot or cold sandwich and drink from any Walmart that's been renovated recently enough to have a "Grab and go" or whatever they're calling it.

A sandwich, a bag of crisps, and a drink at the grocer near me is $8. I don't exactly live in a super low cost of living area, nor is it one of the most expensive in the US.

Meal deal = main + snack/side + drink

The "main" has expanded to Huel, salads, wraps, sushi, even hot food

The "snack" can be more than crisps: small bags of fresh chicken, 2 boiled eggs, small sushi pack, gyozas etc

The "drink" includes quality smoothies, acceptable vending machine coffee etc

Meal deal value maximizing is the whole game lol. There are also lots of healthier options if you choose carefully

In certain Sainsbury's you can get hot food as the main such as a small green curry or chicken goujons, and wedges or hash browns as the side

But the price creeps up £0.50 practically yearly. I think it's £5.50 already in Sainsbury's

It's better to view it as a cheaper alternative to eating at a restaurant rather than somehow saving money compared to bringing in leftovers. People who think £5.50 a day for lunch is saving money versus cooking themselves are delusional


£3.85 in my nearest central-London Tesco, it even includes some premium energy drinks like Tenzing that alone would get close to the cost of the deal.

Ah thanks I haven't been paying close enough attention. That's good

When you have a game that weighs in at 100GB, only a tiny fraction of that is built from code. The rest of it is binary assets that most VCSs struggle with. What makes this worth considering is the fact that they designed it to handle binary assets.

And if your resulting game is 100GB, the source repo was 4TB.

The GDPR is almost trivial to comply with if you’re not harvesting data willy-nilly.

Likewise, the legal risk for small indie games here rounds to zero. Most such games will, at worst, lose access to online leaderboards if their developers shut them down.


I'm a developer of a mobile indie game and it's not true. Just to get started you need to implement tons of third part SDKs like Meta Ads, AdMob, Google Analytics, etc. These require actual handling of player choices, data sanitation etc. disregarding the loss of revenue with not being able to serve personalized ads, or even ads at all to large segments of players. And I'm talking about strictly optional rewarded ads.

These already harmed a lot of small mobile game companies, while the bigger mobile companies had much better means to deal with these.

I personally paid over $10K for different services just to comply, disregarding the loss of revenue over this compliance.


Maybe don't fill your games with ads and release them on restrictive, exploitative platforms?

Did you ever build a commercial project or any business yourself? The nature of your comment implies to me you haven't. I highly recommend you give it a try, it might actually change your mind!

I didn't know it was impossible to build businesses without inserting to Meta/Google/others ad SDK to spy on all my users. Maybe we should stop normalizing these behavior.

Yea good luck getting any reasonable visibility on App Store or Google Play without paying good amount of $$$ to meta, Google etc.

Trust me I would have loved to throwaway this dependency on these platforms, I don't enjoy paying for ads. The market is not pretty, but there's a reason for why it's the way it is. For some reasons, players prefer downloading games for free and then paying potentially hundreds to thousands of dollars on IAPs, rather than everyone paying $5 for a game. I would have preferred it to be the latter personally, but the market doesn't seem to want to act this way.


aka "don't make games that anyone has the chance of playing"

That's an boggling misrepresentation of the market.

The "release them on restrictive, exploitative platforms" part of the comment excludes (depending on interpretation): any mobile platform + Steam

So that excludes ~95% of addressable playerbase.


Your videogame is a data-harvester for the purpose of ad-serving, why on Earth would GDPR compliance be easy for you? It sucks that the mobile market is essentially just a glittery front over privacy invasion vectors, but just because it's normalized it doesn't mean it's right. "Serving third party ads" is exactly the kind of thing the GDPR exists to regulate harshly.

That's cool and all, I really don't have a problem with the requirement to tell players to their face that if they play the game for free, they are sharing their data and preferences with 3rd parties. Denying content creators the ability to (a) restrict content to free loaders who refuse, (b) forcing companies to pay for services that so they could reasonably comply, mostly because the legal language is so ambiguous and broad, is something I do not appreciate.

> The GDPR is almost trivial to comply with if you’re not harvesting data willy-nilly.

I buy a VPS. I apt install nginx. Is it okay that by default, opening http://IP/index.html logs the IP address to /etc/log/nginx/access.log? Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe yes but I need a privacy policy (for an empty index.html). Maybe I need to ask a lawyer (who usually errs on side of caution) because people have been arguing about it for 10 years (and please don't answer here). And in the end, even if I didn't need to do anything, it sure is _some_ nonzero drain of my resources to have think about it at all (completely ignoring whether it's justified or not).


This hinges on two misunderstandings:

- That data processing always requires consent. There are exactly six reasons for storing or processing data: consent, contract fulfillment, legal compliance, vital interests of a natural person, public interest/official authority, or legitimate interest. Collecting IP addresses can be a legitimate interest, but:

- The real interesting question is what you do with the IP addresses after they're stored in a file. Securing your server is a legitimate interest. Tracking your users is generally not. Having lawfully collected data is not a carte blanche to do anything you choose with it.


> Is it okay that by default [...] ?

Yes. IP addresses by themselves are not PII and may be logged indefinitely. It's only after you start correlating them with other shit that you're collecting that they become subject to GDPR.

Same for cookies really. If you *only* operate a shopping cart, you don't have to display a cookie notice for "only technically required cookies". The point of the cookie notice is to dark pattern users into granting more access or just to annoy them enough that they continue not caring about privacy.


Consider for a moment that end-to-end encrypted messaging protects criminals of all sorts. Surely that’s a bad thing and requiring back doors for law enforcement shouldn’t be considered an attack on anybody?

I absolutely agree that the practices SKG are fighting against are pretty abusive and that it is right and proper to restrict those practices, but I also understand why people see the appeal in anti-e2ee laws.

The thing is, I have a good-enough understanding of cryptography to see why those laws are a terrible idea, and I’m infuriated by how clueless their supporters are. I’m self-aware enough to realise that I might the clueless one here and that me not seeing any legitimate issue with SKG doesn’t mean there isn’t one.


"Tech people" aren't one single homogeneous mass. His name is unlikely to show up in the same conversation as, say, DHH.

That's understood in the comment which explicitly indicates that there are many programming circles and that Bellard is known in a number of them (but not all).

eg: I grew up in the Australian Kimberley region (kind of remote), spent decades in geophysical mapping, multi channel data processing, computational algebra, and other odd niches, have no real interest in SV, and am quite familiar with Bellard's work.

No idea who DHH is though.



That validates his point - barely anyone outside the ruby community would even know about DHH if he didn't manage to trigger the eternally outraged.

Oh, yes. That was a straight-face answer to "who DHH is", not anything to contradict or argue anyone's point. I never heard of the initialism in any other context either.

I knew of Fabrice, and have admired him for many years…but who is DHH?

If you did "web stuff" in the early 2000s (like 2005-2010). You'd probably know who he is. He did Ruby on Rails, a backend web framework.

But that was also very Start-up and America focussed. So if you did web dev in some other country and didn't have colleagues who were into that culture you still might've missed the name.


Ru y was something that one guy tinkered with briefly. It was less used than Perl. Java and php was what tools were built in at my company.

TBH the biggest difference is him being more vocal.

I'm pretty sure most of the people who did "web stuff" at the time and used twitter (key point maybe) know him simply because you'd often see his tweets. Regardless of coutry (I'm from Russia, for exampl)


There was a big RoR scene in Glasgow in the mid-2000s, but there were a few of us that were resolutely Django.

I stand by that decision, for various reasons.

Not least being that "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" gave me the ick.


Ruby on Rails creator (among other things).

To be fair, I don't think anyone outside the Ruby community knew who DHH was until his politics went viral on twitter

DHH markets himself much better. His company (basecamp), in a sense, revolves around his public persona and he's unapologetic about this. It's the same with all of his projects (e.g. Omarchy recently).


Yeah, same.

DHH is even less known, don't kid yourself.

I'm not saying DHH is more widely known than Fabrice Bellard. I'm saying that it really depends on your audience. I can think of many colleagues over the years who would know who David is, but not Fabrice.

(Also, I specifically chose DHH as somebody who's highly unlikely to show up in the same discussion as Fabrice Bellard, not because I'm a fan of his. Judging from the replies, I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations!)


Oh DHH is well known. We all know about DHH.

Just that he's a douchebag, not what the letters stand for.

I hope your middle name doesn't start with H ;-)

We know it's not you.


What is a DHH? A person?


> instead of either sampling a few uhs and ums and treating them as noise to be silenced

If you're not paying ttention, ctting out specific sounds can easily cause more trouble. I for one would be quite pset if I couldn't hear the pire's reasoning for calling a foul.


VS Code is built on top of the general-purpose Monaco editor component that's used by a bunch of other projects. This thing is basically meant to be the Monaco of rich-text.

If I post “heathrow83829 is a convicted poopoo head” (replace with your favourite crime) as if it were a factual claim, you’d be well within your rights to sue me for defamation even if people should apply some critical thinking skills and say “wait a minute, how would pdpi know that? Are you sure he isn’t just talking out of his arse?”

Now, search engines are usually afforded some amount of protection against defamation claims — they’re not held liable for simply indexing and quoting third party defamatory claims. Which is to say: Google wouldn’t be liable for claiming you’re a poopoo head if this comment shows up in search results.

The point of this ruling is that AI-generated text isn’t a quote from a third party, it’s text generated by Google’s own tools, so it’s speech by Google itself. It might be wrong, sure, but it’s still presented as a statement of fact.

At trial they can have the whole debate about whether Google was negligent in how they build their systems, and all that jazz, but let’s be clear here — it’s not a matter of every little factual mistake getting Google sued (and that would be absolutely terrifying from a freedom of speech perspective), but rather that the technical means by which you generate content doesn’t change your liability in publishing that content.


The other big point is that some people treat LLMs as if they are truth. We all know that they get a lot wrong, a lot of the time. Yesterday I watch both Elon post something somewhere between badly worded and wrong and another user used Grok to "prove him wrong", but this time being completely wrong in a different way. And this was a matter of law which can be looked up. Anything within throwing distance of politics won't be considered "correct" by everyone ever. Just defining "correct" is harder than it sounds and that probably isn't possible in reality.

I see people claiming LLM are trustworthy on HN all the time.

It is not just some people, it is a lot of people insode the tech itself pushing the "trustworthy" claim.


Yeah, it would take me about 15 minutes to find several examples of people on HN claiming hallucinations are a solved problem

We don't all know they get it wrong a lot. In fact, there's an overwhelming number of people who take it at face value

I think Google added that AI-generated responses maybe incorrect? When you are paying such a low amount of cost, like probably for free, I don't think you can expect a same level of quality as a human written or reviewed of answer. It is like same random user spin up their Lovable and vibe-coded a piece of slop and hold Lovable responsible for not giving them production quality code. It is simple, you get what you paid for. If someone actually figured out AI that is actually always correct, it would be charged in superhuman price as well.

This case isn’t about Google’s users getting low-quality search results. As you say, you get what you pay for. The actual issue is that, in some searches, the AI summaries would claim the plaintiffs were guilty of scams and all-around shady business practices.

Put differently: it’s not newspaper readers complaining the paper is inaccurate, it’s the people mentioned in the articles.


As in rendered server-side.

As funny as it would be, ML isn't really a great fit for ML, I don't think.

That's true for current ML offerings.

However, I think an ML designed for machine learning would be nice, especially if the type system is extended to multidimensional arrays shapes. Pattern matching on array shapes would be rather nice. Ocaml style interactive mode for exploration and compiling for performance would be nice too.


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